Twitter

If you plan to build a lab for vSphere 6.0 you can use all the approches for vSphere 5.x (see also Building a vSphere 5 lab): usually using a nested environment (or three physical systems, if you have) as a common platform.

Of course, the other way to test new products it’s just use the VMware Hands on Labs that you can also “broke” or use in a different path compared to the one suggested by the guide. But having a local environment permit more flexibility and more time for testing or learning.

The big issue with vSphere 6 is that the minimim requirement are increased (at least for the ESXi) and now are become hard requirement! You cannot install the product without the right mount of resources. But after the installation you can try to tune your environment in order to free some MB of memory.

ESXi

The new ESXi 6.0 require at least:

1 GB of disk space (see the partitions schema, that remain the same of previous versions)

4 GB of RAM (it works also with 4000MB, but don’t really try to reduce more), at least for the installation

Note that the new ESXi in nested environment is really fast to boot (less than 30 sec on SATA disk, almost the same also on SSD disk, but only with the 4GB of RAM… with less become slow).

With less than 3.9 GB during the installation, in the RC usually you had an error in the e1000 module load:

The GA with 3.8 GB will just report that the memory is not enought, but with less memory could also appen that you will see generic error load in some modules during the bootstrap of the setup procedure… Or just stop in the “user loaded successfully” phase (with 2.5 GB of RAM)

After the installation with 3.2 GB of RAM it can boot (little slow) and you can use it… With 3 GB it become really slow during the bootstrap… but still it works. With less could be really difficult load the required modules and may not start at all.

One trick could be try to disable some services (from the GUI or from the CLI), but seems that does not change too much the amount of required memory.

I’ve also tried to disable some modules from the boot with this command:
esxcfg-module -d module_name

But still seems that it does not change so much the amount of memory (you can same some MB or RAM).

vCenter Windows

For the installation you need at least 8 GB of RAM and 2 vCPU. But after this you can try to reduce the memory (note that it will slow down the starting of the services during the bootstrap of the VM).

A Windows “embedded” with all in one (included the database and the VUM part) require around 6.8 GB of vRAM to work properly in a lab.

Usually you will deploy a single VA with as an embedded node and this guide can help. The main issue that you can have is how deploy on VMware Workstation? The new vCSA has a guided deployment (from GUI or from CLI) that ask for a ESXi as destination.

But is still possible install also in a Workstation (or Fusion) environment, as described in this guide.

Mainly you have to extract the contents of the ISO and add the .ova extension to following file located invcsa/vmware-vcsa(this file is the traditional VCSA OVA), then you can just upload it with VMare Fusion or Workstation, but make sure you to do not power it on after deployment (otherwise the initialization will start and will hang.

To properly deploy the new VCSA 6.0, the proper OVF properties MUST be set prior to the booting of the VM. But VMware Fusion and Workstation do not support OVF properties!

One really interesting is just add the following entries to the VCSA’s VMX file and replace it with your environment settings. Once you have saved your changes, you can then power on the VM and the configurations will then be read into the VM for initial setup.
guestinfo.cis.deployment.node.type = "embedded"
guestinfo.cis.vmdir.domain-name = "vsphere.local"
guestinfo.cis.vmdir.site-name = "Site-Name"
guestinfo.cis.vmdir.password = "VMware1!"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.addr.family = "ipv4"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.net.mode = "dhcp"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.root.passwd = "VMware1!"
guestinfo.cis.appliance.ssh.enabled = "true"

After the initialization you can try to tune your environment. As written 8 GB is the minimum to start, but then you can reduce the amount of memory: 7.5 GB are still good. With less it become really slow and some services will not start and you can have serious issue, this because the 8 GB of RAM is really fully used:

There is a lot of cached memory that you can try to save (for example if you are running the vCSA on an SSD), but be careful to watch if the bootstrap is correct.

During the boot you can use ALT+F2 and then ALT+F1 too see what is loading and note if some services are expecting errors (note that not all services runs in an embedded environment).

After that you can can try to tune the Linux services (not so much that you can save) or also the vCenter Services (some, like Auto Deploy are already stopped):

About the disk space, if you use thin disk, the vCSA will use at least 16 GB.

Conclusion

In the RC was possible squize more both the vCSA and also the ESXi… but in any case we are really far from the (little more than) 1 GB of RAM for the ESXi and about 4 GB for the vCenter Server. It could be really difficult run a nested environment on a laptop, unless you have at least 16 GB of RAM.

Hands on lab, or hosted solutions, could become really interesting if you don’t have enough resources (RAM is the main critical, but don’t forget also the CPU and the disks… ESXi does not really fast disk and space, at least for itself, but vCenter needs both of them).

And what about Autolab? This powerful tool that can help you in the deployment actually is still for 5.5 version, but just wait to see it supporting also the 6.0 version soon.

BTW: if you have a working configuration with few resource usage, give me a feedback… could be nice found more solution to shrink the memory requirements.

Related Posts

Finally the vSphere 5 download is now available on VMware site: http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/datacenter_cloud_infrastructure/vmware_vsphere/5_0 VMware ESXi 5.0 (Build 469512) VMware vCenter 5.0 (Build 456005) Also the official documents is now available: http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-pubs.html

One month ago, VMware has released a new branch of the VMware Tools, the version VMware Tools 10.2.0 some a new interesting feature: the offline VIB bundle. With this package, you can simply upgrade the embedded VMware Tools components in your VMware ESXi hosts in…

After the vCenter Server (described in the previous post) and the VUM part (this could a simple upgrade, by keeping the existing DB, or a re-install), you can go through the ESXi part. A re-install from scratch could be simple, but you may loose some…

It’s version 6.0 (GA)? When I’ve tried with 4 GB I notice a lot of errors in service start… And was not working… maybe I can try again to see (20 min are a lot, but 4 GB are more reasonable for a lab :) )

A standard laptop (with 16 GB RAM and a Core7) for Workstation nested enviroment.
In the office, I have also a three node ESXi enviroment, that I use for nested lab (actually is with 5.5, but I’m going to upgrade it to 6.0 soon).

I’m having a weird problem here. I’m using Workstation and I’ve created a Workstation VM for esxi1 and installed 6.0 no problem. Additionally also installed the vib for host web client and can make it work ok. The main point is – I’m able to visit the URL shown in the appliance DCUI.

I followed this guide to mount the VCSA iso to my desktop (Win7, 8 GB RAM), copied the vmware-vcsa file to local disk and appended .ova to it and opened & deployed it onto Workstation. Before turning the appliance on, I updated the .vmx parameters exactly as mentioned above (minus site-name). I’ve given in 7.5 GB RAM and 2 vCPU’s. Now I boot; it takes a while but it boots ok.

Problem starts here…
1) I’m unable to go to the URL shown in the DCUI, but am able to ping the IP shown in this screen – https://:443/appliance/support-bundle
2) When I do a “service –-status-all”, I don’t see a vsphere-client service at all.
3) Both the Workstation VM’s have NAT networking from the host

All my knowledge is theoretical and I’m a literal noob with real-life deployments. Would really appreciate your help!

You must see the IP or the host name in the URL… seems that the VCSA parameters are not passed well.
IMHO, considering that the VCSA installation in Workstation is tricky and not supported, consider to use a Windows version of vCenter… much easy to deploy and make it work (in your case).

An IP auto-generated by Workstation DHCP for the vcsa Workstation VM. No, it didn’t ping. BTW, I got myself some more RAM and redeployed vcsa (with the min. 8 GB) in Workstation and now I can go to my vsphere-client from the IP shown in the DCUI. “service vsphere-client status” shows the expected result now too.

Everything is functional now, but even with 8 GB RAM, the VM is quite draggy, maybe I need to throw more RAM at it.

I have workstation 11 running 2012 R2 and even after adjusting the ram and storage, CPU I get “not enough memory” error after trying to create a new sso domain with a “Tiny” setup. What gives??? It’s been driving be nuts!!!!

Hi, I have a core i5 laptop with 16 GB RAM installed. I plan to build a full lab for learning purposes. I have vSphere 5.5, ESXi hypervisor, Windows 10, Windows Server 2012 R2. Are the resources I have enough?